Our recent efforts using primarily nanodiamonds as lubricant additives are discussed. For traditional high performance engine oils, our results show a reduction in friction for steel surfaces for both laboratory experiments under controlled conditions and in a pilot study of passenger cars under typical driving conditions. Examination of the surfaces suggests that surface polishing at the sub-micron scale may be responsible for these results. A separate set of experiments using a quartz crystal microbalance to measure dissipation and drag due to friction has shown that when added to water the charge of the nanodiamond acquired from surface functionalization can have a large influence on uptake and friction at the water-metal interface. More importantly, these results suggest the possibility of creating nanodiamonds with controllable frictional drag at the solid-liquid interface through surface processing. Companion simulation results for nanodiamonds in water sliding between diamond surfaces are also presented. Future possibilities for further understanding and tuning the properties of nanodiamonds as lubricant additives through synergistic experiments and modeling are also discussed.

The results of numerical and analytical investigation of the ultra-intense laser pulse's interaction with overdense plasma are presented. The mechanisms of the wave field energy transformation into the overdense plasma energy are discussed. The effects of radiation propagation deep into plasma as well as long-living vortex formation, plasma boundary instability, and the surface structures formation are obtained. The basic mechanisms for the absorption of incident radiation and the role played by polarization of the radiation are studied. Nonlinear theory of plasma surface instability in the field of the strong electromagnetic wave is developed.

We have used most recent archaeomagnetic and ice core $CO_2$ records for the long-term trend correction in global tree ring radiocarbon concentration ($\Delta^{14}C$). The short-term $CO_2$ exchange system was approximated via first order differential equation with frequency dependent coefficients. A generalized multi-scale box model was constructed and used for the reservoir effect correction.To search for other articles by the author(s) go to: http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abstract_service.html